


Creatures of Snow

by TinCanTelephone



Series: From Tumblr, With <3 [22]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Hoth, Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic, Sort Of, childhood flashbacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 15:22:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16789597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinCanTelephone/pseuds/TinCanTelephone
Summary: For Cassian, Hoth's climate brings back memories of Fest in ways he never expected.Jyn proves to be a good listener, after all.





	Creatures of Snow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anothersadsong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothersadsong/gifts).



> For @oh-nostalgiaa, who prompted “Just breathe… you’re okay, I promise, just breathe.”
> 
> And I was inspired to write a sequel of sorts to More Important Things

_Fest, 26 BBY_

Isobel Jeron Andor was too little to remember when Andrés was born– she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t have _one_ little brother, but she understands what’s going on when she suddenly has _two_ little brothers. 

The New Brother is very little– littler than what she was expecting, especially after how big Mamá’s tummy got, but she’s still fascinated by his tiny, scrunched-up face and huge dark eyes that never stop searching around the room. 

Papá allows her hold him before Andrés, and she’s quite proud, even though Papá never quite lets go of her arms when she has the tiny bundle of blankets against her shoulder. This is also different than what she was expecting. It’s not like holding one of her dolls at all– this thing moves and squirms in her arms, makes odd whimpering, snuffling noises next to her ear when she tries to adjust her grip. 

“Stop moving, Cassian,” she says (because that’s the New Brother’s name). “I’m your big sister, and I love you.” She wishes Cassian would just understand, she’s only going to protect him.

But instead Cassian’s eyes screw shut and he starts crying, which scares Isobel at first because it’s right next to her ear (although she does her best to hide it, because Andrés is watching). Mamá is quick to lean over and take Cassian back, rocking him and petting the soft hair on his head. 

Isobel glares at the ground and tries not to be upset. “Why doesn’t he like me?” 

“He’s a baby, _mija_ ,” Papá says. “Babies cry sometimes.” 

Cassian cries _a lot_. Almost every day, it seems like. Isobel doesn’t understand. What reason does he have to cry all the time? Mamá and Papá do everything for him! He gets carried everywhere, they bring him toys when he points at them, they don’t get mad when he makes a mess. 

She makes sure to point this out. “Papá, if _I_ spilled bean mash all over the floor, I would get into trouble, wouldn’t I?”

“You wouldn’t get into trouble, Bella,” he says, without looking up from the rag he’s scrubbing over the floor while Cassian cries from the nursery. 

“But you would be _exasperated_.” This is a new word Mamá taught her last week, which means something different than _mad_ , although Isobel’s not sure exactly what the difference is. 

“Well…” Papá thinks on it for a little while, then lets go of the rag and kneels so his face is near Isobel’s. “You know better than Cassian. He’s still a baby.”

Isobel lets out a dramatic sigh. This is always the answer. “When will he be not a baby anymore?”

Papá actually smiles at this– a tired, fond sort of smile. “It takes a while, Bella. And in a few years, he’ll be almost as big as Andrés, but he’ll still seem very little to you. Remember you’re a whole five years bigger.” 

Isobel isn’t really satisfied with this– that it’ll take _years_ for baby Cassian to be not-a-baby. “When will he not cry so much anymore?”

Papá huffs a half-laugh and pulls her into his shoulder, rubbing her arm up and down. “He is rather fussy, isn’t he?” 

Isobel decides she likes that word. Fussy. “Yes, he is,” she says. “He’s very fussy.”

“Very particular, our Cassian,” Papá says. He lets her go and stands up with the rag, deeming the stained floor clean enough. 

“Par-tic-lar?” Isobel hasn’t heard that one in school yet. 

“It means he likes things a certain way,” Papá says. “And he doesn’t like it when they’re not that way.” 

“ _Why_ is he so par-tic-lar?”

Papá shrugs. “All babies are different, just like all sentients are different. You know how you and Andrés are different in some ways?”

Isobel wrinkles her nose. “Yeah. He likes to play in the mud.”

Papá laughs. “That’s right. Well, Cassian is different as well.”

Eventually, Isobel decides she understands how Cassian is different, like she and Andrés are different. It’s just harder to tell sometimes because he’s a baby and he’s different in a lot of ways, not just the way that Papá means. 

But he’s so _fussy_ (she really does like that word), he just cries all the time and she can’t tell why. Mamá tells her a different reason every time. 

“He had a nightmare when he was napping.”

“His blanket was wrapped too tight.” 

“He didn’t like the way Papá was holding him.”

“I don’t know, I think he’s just tired.”

She’s always perfectly calm about it, and Isobel starts to believe that maybe it’s just part of being a baby, to cry all the time about lots of things. 

Mamá only gets scared by Cassian’s crying once. 

It started when Andrés came home from school with a cold one day, and even though Mamá and Papá tell him to wash his hands and cover his mouth when he coughs, Isobel and Cassian get sick too. And Isobel feels yucky, but Papá lets her curl up in a blanket next to the stove with Abuela’s pepper soup and that makes her feel a little better. 

Cassian must feel worse though, because he _screams_ , even more than normal, and when he’s not crying, he’s coughing. Loudly, specially for someone so tiny. It sounds like barking, like the dogs she’s seen on the holo, not at all like babies are supposed to sound. 

Mamá and Papá are scared, even if they don’t say so. There’s a line of worry in Mamá’s forehead, and Papá paces for hours back and forth, trying to get Cassian to stop crying and coughing. 

Once, Isobel wakes up, curled on cushions near the hearth, to the voice of Ido Thashin, who only visits when people are very sick or hurt. The last time he visited, it was to tell Mamá and Papá that Abuelo was not coming back. 

Isobel’s heart freezes in fear when she sees Ido handling Cassian, carefully as if he might break, listen to his cough and use his various instruments on him. She doesn’t want to watch, so she pulls a blanket over her head until Ido leaves, and doesn’t come out until she hears Mamá kneel next her. 

“Bella? It’s okay, Ido’s gone now. Everything’s okay.”

Isobel slowly pokes her head out of the blanket. “Mamá, is Cassian going to die?” She feels like she has to whisper it, like saying it too loud will make it true. 

Mamá is shaking her head before Isobel finishes the question. “No, _mija_ , of course not.” She leans over and gathers Isobel in her arms. “He’s not feeling well right now, but Ido gave him some medicine so he’ll get better.”

“I didn’t get medicine,” Isobel says. That means Cassian is sicker, right?

“No, you didn’t,” Mamá says. “But you’re big. Cassian’s still small, he just needs a little help this time.” 

“Okay.” Isobel pulls the blankets tighter around herself. 

“But he _will_ get better, you don’t need to be scared,” Mamá says. “I promise.”

Cassian does get better, and like Mamá and Papá keep saying, he does grow bigger. But Isobel never forgets what his coughing sounded like that first time– every time he’s ill it sounds the same. Ido doesn’t come every time, but Mamá and Papá always look worried, even when they say they’re not. 

Once, she hears Ido say the cold is bad for him, and he shouldn’t be outside so much. Cassian hates this– he hates being left out when she and Andrés go outside and he has to stay in. So Isobel finds a cave in the hills and builds a fire pit, so he can come out with them and there’s someplace warm nearby for when he gets cold. 

That’s what she’s thinking of the last time she sees him– because they’re far in the hills when the warships come down, and she has to get back to town. She just wants to make sure Papá’s okay. Because he and Tía Lucia are involved in _politics_ , and these ships have more stormtroopers than she’s ever seen in her life, too many to throw rocks at, so she kneels next to Cassian at the mouth of the cave and tells him to stay, and that she’ll come back soon. 

Cassian waits for a long time.

* * *

Cassian tries not to think of Fest so much once he leaves. Draven says it isn’t productive, and it won’t do to dwell on the past. And Cassian listens, because he trusts Draven, and there are more important things to think about. Like becoming a good soldier, a better spy. He learns to shed identities and personalities as easily as his clothes, and at some point, his memories of Fest feel like they belong to another person. 

He likes Dantooine, when the Rebels (because that’s what they’re called now) set up a base there. The air is warm all the time, even at night, and he feels like he can breathe more deeply here, pull air to the bottom of his chest. 

He likes Yavin IV too, although sometimes it gets too humid and he starts to feel choked up again. Most of the time, it’s not too bad. He catches a few colds in the years he spends there, and one bad chest infection he blames on the air in the lower levels of Coruscant. 

But he doesn’t begin to put it together until Hoth, when he comes down with the worst case of pneumonia he’s experienced since Fest. At that point, Jyn is there to fuss and worry and pore over his medical records. 

“Why didn’t you tell me it could get this bad?” she says.

“I didn’t know,” he says, between sips of medbay-issued broth. Nearly a week out from the worst of his illness, he’s still too weak to move around much, although he can stay awake for far longer and can stomach nearly an entire meal. 

“How could you not have known?” she says. “It’s _your_ medical record.” She’s still scrolling, scanning his entire history since he’s been with the Rebellion. “You got medbay cough medicine for over half the colds and minor illnesses you’ve ever had. _Medbay cough medicine_.” 

Cassian shrugs, stares at the swirling contents of the bowl in his hands. “I thought that was standard.” 

Jyn looks unimpressed. “It’s not. It’s really unusual, Cassian.” She reaches the bottom, shakes her head. “There’s clearly a pattern here, some sort of problem.”

Again, he thinks of telling her what he remembers from Fest, but stops himself. He doesn’t like dredging those up, especially when the climate of Hoth is so reminiscent and the pain of the flashbacks he’s suffered in recent, less-lucid moments. 

There’s a dream he keeps having, when the meds make him drowsy and he sleeps longer and deeper than he’s used to – 

He stands at the entrance to the hangar on Hoth, except the gate is completely open and it’s empty– no sentients, no equipment, no ships. The landscape outside is completely white and there’s a storm whipping snow into the opening. He’d like to close the gate, but he can’t find it, so the mouth yawns open like a cave. 

He’s cold and he’d like to step away, maybe farther inside, but he can’t. Because somehow he knows– he _knows_ – Jyn is out there. And he has to wait for her. 

There’s warmth at his back, and sometimes he turns. (Not always, because sometimes even his dream-self knows what he’ll see, and how much it’ll hurt.) A girl kneels by a small fire, poking at it with a stick and adjusting the wood to keep it burning. Two black braids hang over her shoulders, visible outside the thick white parka and hood pulled over her head. 

“Don’t worry,” she says in Festian. “She’ll come back.”

_I don’t know that_. His mouth opens and his lips form the words, but he doesn’t feel his throat vibrate. 

She seems to hear him anyway. “She will.” She never looks up at him, just tends the fire, gently coaxing the flames to grow and consume the new logs she stacks from a small pile behind her. “She loves you.”

_You love me._

“I do.”

_And you still left._

She finishes adjusting the fire and sits back on her heels. “Come closer, Cassian. The fire is good for you.”

He doesn’t move. 

“You should stay warm, you know,” she says. “Mamá always says so.”

_I’m older now. I’m stronger._

“I know.” She nods, holds the palms of her hands to the flames. Maybe it’s the light, but they look so pale. “But you don’t have to be strong all the time.”

She makes a good point, and Cassian gives in, walking towards the fire and holding his hands out, fingers almost numb from the cold. But he positions himself so he can still see the gate from where he kneels, just in case. 

“She’s coming back,” Isobel says again. 

And then Cassian looks up and sees her face, and it’s a mistake every time, because it looks exactly the same as it did the last time he saw her, just paler, almost stiff. Her lips are tinged blue and there’s snow on her eyelashes, even though she’s kneeling over a fire. 

And he can never help it– he leans around the flames with his arms outstretched, just to touch her one last time, rub some warmth back into her limbs, some life back into her face. 

But his hands never seem to reach her, and the air he’s breathing is suddenly too hot and full of soot and he wakes up congested and coughing.

– “Cass? Cassian?” 

Jyn’s voice brings him back to the present– their room on Hoth with the heat turned up too high, bowl of stew trembling in his hands. 

“Cassian?” Jyn leans over so her face is in front of his, takes the bowl before anything spills. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.” 

“Please don’t apologize.” She rearranges the blankets over his legs and sits on the bed in front of him, rubbing his legs up and down. “We… we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” she says. “I’m just trying to figure things out. And… whatever you need, I want to be here to give it to you.” 

Maybe it’s the feel of her hand rubbing circles on his thigh, or the memory of the dream fresh in his mind, but he suddenly wants to tell her _everything_ , and not just what he remembers of being sick as a child, but about his Mamá and Papá and Isobel and Andrés and the cave and how much he _loves_ her, and how he’s so, so terrified he’ll lose her. 

And maybe it’s the cocktail of meds in his system or just the sudden wave of emotion, but this time he gives in. 

He wakes in the middle of the night too hot, under three blankets and Jyn curled around him. She’s kept the temperature in the room far too high since he was released, and he hasn’t had the heart to tell her to turn it down. 

She’s still asleep behind him, the way they were when he finished telling her about the last time he saw Isobel, and the dreams of her that have come back. 

It exhausted them more than he realized, and she fell asleep with her clothes still on, as the rest of his dinner grew cold on the nightstand. 

Jyn shifts and presses closer to him, and he remembers how hot he is. He eyes the temperature control next to the door. Just a few degrees. He could turn it down just a few degrees and she wouldn’t notice. 

He carefully extracts himself from her arms, peeling back the layers of blankets as he sits up. He holds his ribs and tries not to groan at the change in orientation, as the mucus that built up in his sleep shifts in his chest. He swallows against the prickling in his throat and resolves not to cough. It would only wake Jyn and that’s already happened too many nights in a row. 

He manages to stumble to the door through the dizziness, toes curling against the icy floor, and is nearly back under the covers when he yawns without thinking about it. 

It feels good at first, to cough out the crap sitting loose near the top, but because this pneumonia _sucks_ , soon it’s just dry hacking and of course Jyn is awake and rubbing his back.

“Shh, shh, just breathe… You’re okay, I promise. Just breathe.”

He collapses back on the pillows when it’s over, pulling her with him. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“Don’t apologize,” she says, although there are circles under her eyes and she already looks half asleep. 

“I love you.” It spills out of him before he can think about it, but her smile is worth it and she draws him into her chest. 

“I love you, too.”

“I miss her,” he whispers, because the memories are so fresh in his mind. She’s the last member of his family he ever saw alive, and the face he remembers the best. 

And sometimes the loss feels like a new, raw wound all over again and he wonders if he’ll ever feel whole. And then he focuses on Jyn, curled around him with her ear on his collarbone, where she can feel him breathing. 

When he closes his eyes, the warmth from her feels like the fires Isobel built in the cave on Fest. Small but strong, and more than enough to keep the cold and the darkness at bay. 

**Author's Note:**

> [Original Tumblr Post](https://cats-and-metersticks.tumblr.com/post/179740072215/guess-what-how-about-this-one-just-breathe)
> 
> Of course, all the conversations from Isobel’s POV would actually happen in Festian. It’s in English for ease of understanding (also I don’t speak any other languages). 
> 
> Ending Credits  
> “Dirty Paws” - Of Monsters and Men  
> “Blue Lips”- Regina Spektor
> 
> I'm on tumblr as [cats-and-metersticks](https://cats-and-metersticks.tumblr.com/) :)


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